Prior to teaching this lesson, you will have to gather magazines for each child or gather lots of pictures of signs and words from items or from magazines. Then you can sort these items by beginning letter. Identify the sounds made by the letters in logos. Sort logos and words by category (foods, drinks, snacks, signs). A simple alphabet book can be created using all your cutouts by organizing all the A words, B words, C words, etc. The children can have fun learning to read a book that they helped to construct. Environmental print provides lots of opportunities for kids to interact with letters, sounds, and words.

Boys and girls, I want to show you the new book I made. There is a page for every letter in the alphabet! I am so excited to share it with you. Look, Aa...Bb...Cc...Isn't it the greatest? (What I am showing the children is a book of manila paper with a letter written at the top. The rest of the page is blank.)

"This book has no pictures." "That book is boring!" "What are you going to do with the rest of the book?"

What? You don't like it? What do you think I should do with the book? "Throw it away!" I am not going to throw it away, instead, I am going to ask you to help me. I wanted to make an ABC book, so maybe if I give you each a magazine and one page from my book, you could find letters that match your page, and add them to my book. I can't wait to see what you come up with!

Now you are ready to go on a Magazine Alphabet search. Each of you has a magazine and a page from my book. Your job during Word Work Station is to see how many letters you can find from the magazine, cut them out and glue them to the book page. I wonder who will find the most? Today we are only looking for that letter. Another day, we will look for pictures and environmental print that begins like the letter that you are working on.

So let me repeat your task. You will look at a page in the magazine and find your letter. Cut it out carefully and then glue it to the page. Remember when we glue, we put the glue on the smaller piece of paper. Which do you think will be smaller, the letter or the sheet of paper? That's right, the letter, so the glue goes on the letter, and then the letter goes on the book page.

I love the way that the children at Word Work are busy working. They are certainly going to make our book look wonderful.

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Resources

When your time is up at the Word Work Station, you will put your magazine in the box and bring me your book page. We will talk about what you discovered as you were working. What letter were you looking for? What sound does it make? Was it easy to find the letters? Why do you think it was easy or difficult to find your letters? Did you use your time wisely?

I ask the children some of these questions because I want them to be aware of the frequency that the letter is used. Qq is probably going to be more challenging than Ss. Sometimes the pages come back to me still blank, so I want to see if it was because their letter search was difficult or if they were wasting time. This activity uses up the Word Work time for the week between looking for letters, and then finding pictures to go with the pages.

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